Charter Weekend

Saturday found me waiting for the cable guy for an 8-12pm time slot. I had numerous problems with my Charter digital cable, but here are some of the highlights:

• Showtime Channel 500 wouldn't work on the living room set, but would work in the bedroom.
• Select a pre-recorded show on the DVR and the screen would go blank. If I reset the DVR, only then would it work.
  
• Turn on the Charter Digital Cable and sometimes the sound wouldn't work so I'd have to crank my Bose Cinemate system to it's limits to hear the sound. Again, I had to reset the DVR to get the sound to come back on.
  
• Favorite channels such as Comedy Central, E! and MTV were all fuzzy.

A young man showed up around 10:30am to work on all these issues. Problem was he was so creepy that I only chose to focus on two major problems--fuzzy reception and no Showtime. He was creepy because he was so damn quiet. No personality. Answered in one word replies and didn't make eye contact. It was simply disconcerting to have him in the house. I think Minnie my little fat Beagle was kinda creeped out too because she just went into the bedroom to lay down. If he was normal, she would have stayed on the couch and watched him with interest.

After spending a good amount of time running new lines, I'm happy to report the cable is working excellent. The major cause of all my problems was water got into the cable lines that were running along the roof. Since he wasn't authorized to go climbing on rooftops, he got creative and linked up some new connections through existing wires.

Sunday was a bust. I surprisingly discovered that since March 20th all email being sent to [email protected] was not getting forwarded to my Gmail account. There were so many signs that something was wrong, but I never really put two and two together. I paid the price, too. Today I spent all day reading 1, 044 emails sent to my Charter email address.

I think somehow what happened is my forwarding setting on the Charter account got wiped out and all my email just started being stored on the Charter server. I have many, many email addresses. But nothing compares to Gmail. I love their search feature, the amount of storage available, the star feature and especially the ability to label emails for easy retrieval later.

It took me all day today to sort through over one thousand emails. Fortunately I didn't miss much in the past month except lots of information related to the stuff I track. But since I also have many of these newsletters sent to my Gmail address, what was missing was deceptive because I didn't realize it was missing. (Thank God I have auto-payments set up on all my bills, huh?)

A bit of advice. If someone says they sent you an email and you lazily say, "Huh? I never got it." Don't assume they are the one's who didn't send it or somehow they screwed up. You just might be surprised to discover the problem was you.